[Bug 1942774] Re: No fallback English layout on "Who are you?" screen during installation. Ubiquity won't accept non-Latin characters

[Adam Williamson]

I can confirm this with Ubuntu 23.04.

I'm the QA team lead for Fedora, and I am possibly excessively
interested in keyboard layout stuff. While fixing things for Fedora's
new install flow I wanted to look into how other distros handle this, so
I started testing, and ran straight into this issue.

As originally described, if you boot Ubuntu 23.04 - the 'desktop'
installer image - select to install, then select a non-ASCII-capable
keyboard layout like Russian or Bulgarian (either by specifically
selecting it, or by selecting a language whose default keyboard is one
of these, like...Russian or Bulgarian), *only* that (xkb) layout is
configured. This makes it impossible to complete the install, because
you cannot enter a username that the installer will accept as valid. You
can only complete the install if you break out of the installer and run
GNOME Settings and add an ASCII-capable layout yourself.

The way we aim to handle this on Fedora is that if you select a layout
that is not ASCII-capable, we add 'us' to the xkb config. Based on user
feedback in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1039185 , we
make us the *first* layout and the native layout the *second*, because
users told us this is what they expect, and it makes sense: usually
during installers you need to type Latin (ASCII) characters, not native
ones, as you generally want user names, passwords, mount points etc. to
be in Latin characters (stuff tends to break otherwise). Similarly on
boot of the system, you are more likely to need to type Latin than
native characters, so the US layout should be first. We set up both a
clickable switcher and a switch key combo to select the native layout,
if desired, and show an indicator of the current layout.

Fedora's implementation of this is based on langtable -
https://github.com/mike-fabian/langtable - which contains information on
whether keyboard layouts are ASCII-capable or not.

The other tricky part here, btw, is selecting an appropriate *console*
(kbd) layout. I haven't yet looked into how Ubuntu approaches that.

** Bug watch added: Red Hat Bugzilla #1039185
   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1039185

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1942774

Title:
  No fallback English layout on "Who are you?" screen during
  installation. Ubiquity won't accept non-Latin characters

Status in ubiquity package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Impish Indri daily

  I cannot reproduce this bug anymore. Layout is hard-set to English,
  which solves this issue but creates another issue discussed in bug
  #1945848. Still, I'll leave the steps required to reproduce below:

  Steps to reproduce:
  1) Choose any language with a character set outside of ISO 8859-1. In my case, Russian
  2) Proceed with installation. Arrive at "Who are you?" screen
  3) Type in your name in Russian layout
      - The "Your username" field is not filled automatically
  5) Try typing a username you wish to use
      - It cannot recognize the characters and won't let you continue.
      - It will thus complain that usernames should begin with lowercase letters

  No matter if the letters are lower or upper case, it simply cannot
  recognize them.

  User is forced to manually add English or a similar layout that has
  Latin characters.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 21.10
  Package: ubiquity 21.10.5
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.13.0-14.14-generic 5.13.1
  Uname: Linux 5.13.0-14-generic x86_64
  NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zavl icp zcommon znvpair
  ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu68
  Architecture: amd64
  CasperMD5CheckResult: pass
  CasperVersion: 1.465
  CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
  Date: Mon Sep  6 17:37:52 2021
  InstallCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed maybe-ubiquity quiet splash ---
  LiveMediaBuild: Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" - Alpha amd64 (20210905)
  ProcEnviron:
   TERM=xterm-256color
   PATH=(custom, no user)
   XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
   LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: ubiquity
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

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